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I was happy to sit down once again with Alex Cascio of Feel Good Action, and we had a genuinely great conversation. We could’ve talked for another few hours, and we probably will in the coming weeks on more lives. Thank you to everyone who watched live and persevered through a few attempts as Substack glitched! If you’re catching the recording now, welcome.
Alex opened with cautious progressive optimism and immediately backed it up. Turnout numbers, surprise primary wins, Angie Nixon winning the Senate nomination in Florida, and Abdul El-Sayed pulling off what he’s pulling off in Michigan. Alex made the point that the candidates refusing corporate money are the ones performing, and that this is a verdict on grassroots people power over money.
I said the same dynamic is showing up across ideological lines. Democrats across the spectrum are doing the same thing: speaking directly to what people are actually living through.
We spent real time on the affordability argument, because it’s the whole ballgame. Alex pointed out that the issue polling hasn’t moved since 2024. Groceries, rent, health care. Trump ran on fixing what people felt under Biden, and two years in, nothing has changed. In fact, he’s made it worse.
Meanwhile, Trump has said out loud that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial problems while conducting his war. He’s made billions of dollars, a chunk of it from crypto, and he’s spending his attention on ballrooms and golf course expansions. Alex flagged the East Potomac Park plan, where a public national park with the cherry blossoms is getting bulldozed for a bigger course while public bike paths disappear. I keep calling him the personification of the K-shaped economy. Reagan sold trickle-down. This is trickle-up, straight into Donald’s pockets, and everybody can see it.
Alex made the sharpest structural point of the live, and I want to sit with it. Treating Trump as a spontaneous event is a mistake. He’s the product of decades of American politics that leaned on white supremacy, on unregulated capitalism at working people’s expense, and on the complicity in leaving all of it unaddressed.
I agreed and traced the line: Backlash to the Civil Rights era, then the Southern Strategy with Nixon’s dog whistles and Reagan’s welfare queens, then Trump ripping the mask off entirely. That’s why I want the next Democrat to be a builder. Prosecute the people who broke the law. Pass sweeping anti-corruption legislation. Codify the norms Trump shredded. Rebuild the agencies he dismantled, bring back USAID, go hard on affordability and health care. FDR fixed the banking crisis in a week. Stop pretending the tools don’t exist.
On the risks, Alex raised Texas: more than a million voters purged from the rolls and many polling places closed, plus the USPS mail-in ballot mess. We both think it backfires. When people feel their rights are being targeted, they plan accordingly.
Alex’s bigger worry is what comes after November: another round of stolen election lawsuits, and she’s right to name it. My answer is to get vigilant now. Read Democracy Docket, use Marc Elias’s resources, and sign up to be a poll worker, which Alex noted is a paid job. I’m bullish on Texas with Talarico, and on North Carolina, Alaska, and Josh Turek in Iowa. Alex thinks the Senate is genuinely in play.
Don’t let Republicans demoralize you. They’re the ones losing.
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